Outside the intertwining diamond rings
on a saint’s dress in a painting, beyond the frame
next to the chapel where the guidebook
mistook Dante’s hell for purgatory,
his suicidal Harpies for Man-Doves,
just past the Brunelleschi crucifix,
the seats where the preaching friars sit
are carved with scrolls and heads of animals
or men or monsters in between.
I want to know what kind of wood
and how the hinges will convert the seat
into a stall where a monk can stand for a while
to worship, tucked neatly into his niche
like the saint he is or may become.
Look closely on the armrest and you see
the pinprick wormholes perpetrated
over centuries. Softer than fetus flesh,
each worm extended the finger of its hunger,
and like a nearly imperceptible symbol of
a crucifixion nail, drove its being
into boring. Almost no one notices
in this nave where the naïve are drawn
like moths to where the stained glass
light above a chapel altar seems to make
each of us a cracking chrysalis restored
to what we always must have been becoming.
